Adaptable and Adaptive Information Provision for All Users , Including Disabled and Elderly People 1

Due to the tremendously increasing popularity of the World-Wide Web, hypermedia is going to be the leading online information medium for some years to come and will most likely become the standard gateway for citizens to the “information highway”. Already today, visitors of web sites are generally heterogeneous and have different needs, and this is likely to increase in the future. The aim of the AVANTI project is to cater hypermedia information to these individual needs by adapting the content and the presentation of web pages to each individual user. The special needs of elderly and disabled users are also partly considered. A model of the characteristics of user groups, individual users and usage environments, and a domain model are exploited in the adaptation process. One aim of this research is to verify that adaptation and user modeling techniques that were hitherto mostly used for catering interactive software systems to able-bodied users also prove useful for adaptation to users with special needs. Another original aspect is the development of a network-wide user modeling server that can concurrently accommodate the user modeling needs of several applications and several instances of an application within a distributed computing environment.